Lost in the attic .............. a new collection of photographs of Chorlton........ nu 1 Whitelow Road

This is Whitelow Road sometime in the early 20th century and with the picture comes one of those intriguing little stories.

It is one of a collection of images which were donated to St Clements Church and were found in the attic of a house.

And that is about all I know of the history of the twenty or so photographs of Chorlton.

All except one date from sometime after 1900 and measure 25.5 cms by 42 cms and have been reproduced from picture postcards.

I would love to know who went to all the trouble of first collecting and then enlarging the images and later storing them away.

Now there will be a story there but I doubt it will ever come to light.

So instead I shall concentrate on this one which shows a gang of labourers at work.

I don’t have a date but the company whose name plate appears on the steam engines was Davies Brothers, Asphalt Road Makers who were listed in the 1911 directory with an office on Princess Street and a depot on Green Lane.

Green Lane ran from Brook Street to the Garratt Bridge by the River Medlock in Chorlton on Medlock and long ago was swept away by new developments which included the old BBC Broadcasting building.

What makes the picture interesting is that it is one I have never seen before and comes with a companion photograph which also shows Whitelow Road with the same team of workmen.

Both contain a wealth of detail from the steam engines, barrels of tar to the wooden sets and the large number of labourers.

This was after all at a time when much of the work still relied on muscle power and so despite the steam engines it was still down to shovels, wheelbarrows and a lot of effort.

But the pictures also include that small band of spectators who have been drawn to the scene.

Like the workman they stare back at the camera with that mix of poses, some stopped in their tracks, a few looking curious and the rest those who just can’t miss the opportunity to be in the picture.

And of these the one I am drawn to is the chap in uniform pausing with his parcels to be caught on camera.

Now I am sure there will be someone who can help explains the use of the long wooden beam across the road and others who will want to speculate exactly where along Whitelow Road the pictures were taken from so I shall close by reflecting on how many more pictures of old Chorlton are sitting in attics across the township.

Pictures; Whitelow Road date unknown, from the Simpson Collection

Sitting in a backstreet in Florence ......... thinking of WLS radio station, Chicago

Florence, 2012

Now if you belong to that generation which was born just after the last world war, who grew up with the sound of Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, and trembled during the Missile Crisis of 1962 I expect Radio Luxemburg will stir memories.

In the absence of a dedicated British pop music radio station this was all there was till the “Pirates” arrived.

Of course it wasn’t perfect, it faded and returned and you had to put up with Horace Bachelor but it was still magic.*

And I was reminded of all that when my friend Susan from Canada told me of how “on clear nights throughout the 1960's, from my upstairs bedroom, close to the Manitoba/Ontario border, I could actually get WLS radio station in Chicago, almost a thousand miles away. They played songs I never heard anywhere else.”

Now my little transistor set bought for twenty-one shillings in Whitechapel hardly compared with Susan’s “purple and gold bakelite radio” but what they offered was something new, exciting and worlds away from our kitchen in Well Hall Road.

On the Highway Canada, 2011

All of which stirred the pot and made me begin to think of many things, but uppermost it was that idea of listening across the open lands of Canada to a radio station in Chicago and not for the first time I pondered on the vastness of Canada.

My cousins who live in Ontario will think nothing of a journey by car which will take them from their home to the small log cabin they built one summer.

It is a distance which if I replicated it here would pretty much take me from Manchester down across Europe to Vienna and would present me with a shed full of different European languages, histories and until recently even currencies.

The gas station, 2011

But for my cousin the journey would all be under a Canadian sun, with English spoken along the way and the sure knowledge that the petrol bought in Ingersol would come out of the same money as the payment for  the burger at the stop over half way and the groceries at the tiny supermarket close to their destination.

And if I push the idea, had my great uncle who was migrated to Canada by the Middlemore Homes acting for the Derby Union taken the Trans Canada Highway from St John’s in Newfoundland to Victoria in British Columbia he would have travelled 4,859 miles.

By comparison if I had continued on from Vienna to Istanbul I would only have clocked 2,108 miles from the suburbs of south Manchester to the Bosporus and the end of Europe.

That for me brings home the sheer size of Canada and of course also its southern neighbour but it also reinforces my fascination for my own Continent which offers tremendous diversity but also a sense of unity.

Rome, 2009

We may speak different languages, and some at least of us still carry our own national currency in our pockets instead of the Euro but there is much we have in common.

Sitting in a backstreet restaurant in Florence or in down town Naples with heaps of history and culture everywhere I am reminded that 2000 years ago my journey would have been one made across one empire with a single currency, and just two official languages and bits of the small town of Manchester would have been replicated in the grand cities of Rome and Byzantium.

Added to which much that followed the fall of the Roman Empire from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance and the Age Enlightenment owed much to the Romans.

That said while sitting at that tiny restaurant in Florence the background music on the small portable CD player veered from a selection by the Three Tenors to that Harry Chapin song with the refrain “I am the morning D.J at W.O.L.D. .......... playing all the hits for you where ever you maybe...”

On the farm, 2011

And that is pretty much  where we came in, leaving me only to share the contrasting images from three of my favourite Italian cities with the stunning photographs of rural Canada by my friend Lori Oschefski and perhaps giving a plug to that endearing radio series on Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Now Lake Wobegon may have been an imaginary town set in the USA but it pretty much sums up what I think a small Canadian town out somewhere in the west of Alberta might be like and as such is miles away from those small Italian cities I know.

Alghero, 2013

The huge open landscape which just seems to go on forever runs counter to the close confines of those towns and cities where at the end of every street there is a piazza and  around every corner an ancient ruin.

That said there are plenty of ugly places where poor planning, low investment and shoddy development have created sink suburbs, dispiriting to live in and unremarkable to the eye.

Not so bits of Alghero which has it all, and may even have its own radio station dedicated to the music of the 60s.

Pictures; Florence 2012, Rome, 2009, and Alghero, Sardinia, 2013 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Canadian heartlands, 2011, Lori Oschefski

* Horace Cyril Bachelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 3 Tasle Alley

Now Tasle Alley is one of those places most people will pass without a second glance.

It is the gap almost on the corner of John Dalton Street and Albert Square which with its double yellow lines which often looks dark and gloomy can’t be much of an attraction.

On the other hand for the curious that little ginnel beside New Church House on John Dalton Street suggests an adventure and if you plunge in the tunnel leads on to Tasle Alley and through a second tunnel to Mulberry Street and St Mary’s Chapel which is more popularly known as the Hidden Gem.

As late as 1849 Tasle Alley lay open on its northern side but within two years that open land had been built on and it became the narrow alley we know today and as these things go it didn’t even warrant a listing in the street directory.

I had thought that just perhaps because the buildings seem to date from 1851 they had missed being incorporated in the street directory for 1850, but no, Mr Slater's fine Directory for 1863 stubbornly refused to list  anything for the alley.

Tasel Alley, 1849

By 1900 the alley had a set of warehouses which were mainly furniture and printing with a wine merchants and a set of offices.

So that is about it.




Location; Manchester





Picture; Tasle Alley, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1849 from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

“Longing to tell you ‘the Tale’ at Eltham” ……. October 12th, 1917

Now sadly I doubt that the “The Tale” in the picture postcard refers to the short story written in 1916 by Joseph Conrad and published the following year.

Nor did the recipient live in Eltham.

She was a Miss Nell Goddard who lived in Wenhaston, which is a small village of 818 people in north west Suffolk.

The Domesday Book records that the village had a mill, a church and woodland sufficient to feed sixteen hogs.

Wenhaston, briefly had a railway station which was part of the Southwold Railway which opened in 1879 and closed in 1929 and today has a “thriving pig farm industry.” *

But it does have a pre-Reformation panel painting depicting the Last Day of Judgement, which Miss Nell would have known, because the panel was discovered during restoration work to the church in 1892.

All of which is a long way from Eltham and leaves me to think that this was one of those picture postcards produced in their thousands which were over printed with the names of different places.

That said I like it.

And given that we have the name of the manufacturer, who was a W & K Lonson along with a serial number, we might in the fullness of time find out more.

I hope so.

Location; 1917

Picture; postcard, courtesy of David Harrop

* Wenhaston, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenhaston

The Eltham we have lost, part 2........ The old lane by the National Schools, 1908

Another of those pictures of Eltham’s past which need no comment

This is the old lane by the National Schools as it was in 1908.  The lane is now Archery Road and 'One acre Allotments' was on the right.









Picture; the old lane,  from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ..... nu 65 the vanished 22 houses and 81 people

I can’t think anyone would mourn the disappearance of Back Canal Street and Little David Street.

In the space where two streets existed, Chorlton Street, 2016

In 1841 81 people lived in 22 of the 28 back to back properties which had been built as one up one downs at the beginning of the 19th century.

Here lived a mix of families who earned their living as labourers, textile workers with the odd craftsmen.

So few back to backs have survived that it is difficult sometimes to realize how small these properties were and how overcrowded they must have been.

Suffice to say that the width of this stone fronted building on Chorlton Street took in the combined width of Little Canal Street and the back to back houses.

The two streets in 1849

And I think we can be even more precise and calculate that the width of the street would be the distance from the edge of the brick building to right side of the doorway and what was left would be the width of the houses.

Looking at the census records for the June of 1841 reveals that some of the houses were occupied by just one person while others contained four to five people and one had nine individuals crammed in to its two rooms.*

But those with single occupants were in the minority and the general picture is one of overcrowding made worse by what appears to be the provision of only one lavatory.

The sound of young voices in Little David Street, 1841

The largest single age group were the young with 18 out of 52 in Back Camp Street under the age of 10, and 11 out of 29 in Little David Street.

All of which must have been a constant worry for parents with the canal and an arm of the canal surrounding the properties on two sides.

And it may well have been the canal which did for our 28 houses.  Maps from the 1890s show they no longer existed and the 1863 directory lists a warehouse on the site which may even have been there by the 1850s.

So a short life for those two streets.

Location; Manchester

*Census, Little David and Back Camp Streets, Enu 10, 7-8, London Road, Manchester, 1841

Pictures; the site of Little Canal and Little David Streets, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and streets in 1849, from the OS map of Manchester & Salford 1844-49 courtesy of Digital Archives Association,  http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

Tracking the age of your house in Chorlton

Now one of the first golden rules of research is that you never turn down any information you are given.

It might not fit with what you are doing but from experience it will sometime in the future.

Age of Buildings of chosen area

All of which is why I leapt at the offer from Phil Portus of an undergraduate project he undertook on Chorlton in the summer of 1968.*

Phil was in his first year of a Geography and Geology BSc and set out to answer the question “to what extent did Urban growth after 1850 proceed within the physical framework of pre-existing patterns of land ownership” which involved using the tithe map of 1844 and comparing it with OS maps of the period from the 1840s across the rest of that century and into the next.

The final piece of work included his written answer along with a series of beautifully drawn maps and overlays showing land ownership in 1844, the age of buildings from before 1844 through to 1955 and two detailed overlays of land ownership and the age of properties on the northern side of Beech Road from St Clements to Barlow Moor Road and back to Hardy Lane.

What is all the more remarkable is that this of course was done before the internet which meant that there was no recourse to online searches and pretty much everything was drawn from documents held in the archives and local history library down at the Ref.

And judging by his conclusions also involved a lot of field work out on Beech Road and the neighbouring roads observing the properties and matching their position against the field boundaries and the tithe plan.

All of which contributes to our knowledge of the history of Chorlton.

Detail from Age of buildings in chosen area

But like all research it also offers up unexpected information and prompts for further research.

So while I knew that the social housing which stretches south down Barlow Moor Road dated from before the Second World War I had never researched it in enough detail to come up with an end date of 1923.

Likewise Phil confirmed what I always suspected that small pockets of infill development around Ivy Green were undertaken between 1939 and 55.

Which just then left those unintended consequences, like the date that Church Road became Chequers.

Now I am not alone in spotting just how many name changes were made, and plenty of people have their own personal one, but I had always been puzzled as to when this might have happened.

The logical date was when we voted to join the city in 1904 but the changes were much later with people suggesting the late 1960s or early 70s and Phil at least has confirmed that Church Road was still in use in 1968.
That said Stephen has commented, "I can't agree with the idea that Chequers Road only got that name as late as 1968. I was at St John's RC primary school from 1955 to 1962, and it was Chequers Road then. 

Maybe some locals still referred to the old name. I still think of Zetland Road as Holland Road, it's old name, as the name change took place after I had ceased to use it on a daily basis to get to and from school."

So there you have it, a piece of research undertaken forty-nine years ago which  is still doing the business but may need a revisit.

*Salford Project, http://www.philportus.co.uk/salford-project/

Picture; overlay of properties on the north side of Beech Road, 1968 courtesy of Phil Portus